No NYC Show Scheduled for The Walkmen’s 10-Year Anniversary, It’s Cool, Didn’t Really Want to See Them Play “The Rat” Anyways

So I lied: I would kill to see them play “The Rat” again. Or to see how far Hamilton Leithauser arches his back during the “See me age 19 with some dumb haircut from 1960, moving to New York City” line during “We’ve Been Had.” Or to remember listening to “Thinking of a Dream I Had” in college, imagining what life would be like in NYC. Or, you know, just hearing “Louisiana” would be really nice. Lucky for folks in San Francisco and Chicago, they’ll be treated to career-spanning “Evenings with The Walkmen” shows in January to mark the band’s 10-year anniversary. While it stands to reason that they’ll do something here — if it wasn’t for this city, they wouldn’t exist, right? — there’s at least the first-ever(?!) vinyl pressing of their 2002 debut Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone to look forward to (according to Insound, pre-orders are going rather quickly), as well as a Phil Ek-produced new album slated for summer via Fat Possum. We expect it to be visceral and also elegant, and for some songs to reach cathartic climaxes and then other songs to be neurotically subdued. It’s crazy to think that The Walkmen have already been around for a decade, but hats off to them for honing a sound that’s distinctly no one else’s (and quite possibly the best drum sound of the aughts). We look forward to the next 10 years.